quotations about competition
Competition is in the genes of all living things. Watch a flower compete for its share of sunlight or watch the goldfish in your aquarium. Infants and small children compete without knowing it. Remember how the queen bee wins? Competition is the spice of life and the soul of progress. How else can quality rise to the top?
CHARLES T. CLARK
The Rotarian, May 1988
Men must release themselves from the poison of competition ... and, seeing the Oneness of all men, embrace co-operation for the General Good.
BENJAMIN CREME
The Art of Co-operation
Step it up my life
spent round the clock
has got me running on a treadmill with no time to stop
and competition has put a price on time,
see all the people you left behind
and step on all the people that have fell behind,
competition has put a price on time.
LESS THAN JAKE
"Econolodged"
Competition isn't all there is to life and isn't even all there is to business life.
PATRICK HOVERSTADT & LUCY LOH
Patterns of Strategy
We say that competition never made initiative. That if any initiative has survived under competition it has only done so because it is more powerful than competition. Competition don't pay initiative. It pays theft.
HORACE TRAUBEL
The Conservator, October 1912
Contrary to what people think, competition isn't productive. It doesn't necessarily lead to greater success or achievement, because trying to do well and trying to beat others are two different things. They may even work in opposite directions, because the research shows that people do better when they are intrinsically motivated by the activity they're engaged in, but trying to beat others, trying to win, is an extrinsic motivation. Competition decreases intrinsic motivation, and performance diminishes.
RANDOLPH FREEZELL
Playing Games: An introduction to the philosophy of sport through dialogue
The more competitive people are ... the more insecure they are underneath, such that displays of superiority can be interpreted as compensatory mechanisms for an underlying inferiority complex.
TOMAS CHAMORRO-PREMUZIC
Confidence: How Much You Really Need and How to Get It
Many competitive people are insecure. They are obsessed with proving they are better than someone else in one endeavor or another. Merely knowing that they are better is not good enough. They must constantly prove it--primarily to themselves.
DEBORAH SMITH PEGUES
30 Days to a Stronger, More Confident You
All you have to do is play better than the other guy and things go well. If you don't play better than the other players then somebody takes your place. Now a lot of guys, in this day and time with the transient nature of the sport, as soon as the competition gets too good, they want out.
BILL PARCELLS
In a competitive culture, a child is told that it isn't enough to be good--he must triumph over others. Success comes to be defined as victory, even though these are really two very different things. Even when the child manages to win, the whole affair, psychologically speaking, becomes a vicious circle. The more he competes, the more he needs to compete to feel good about himself. It's like drinking salt water to slake a thirst.
ALFIE KOHN
"The Case Against Competition", Working Mother, September 1987
Competition means decentralized planning by many separate persons.
FRIEDRICH HAYEK
Individualism and Economic Order
To free the mind from the habit of competition, we must see in detail the process by which the mind is ensnared by competition. The way out of a trap is to know the way the trap is built. Only then will it cease being a trap. The release from the stranglehold of competition lies in the increase of self-reliance, since competition can only arise out of a lack of self-reliance! It is that simple. Self-dependence accomplishes that which competition can never touch. As we have said, the competitive person makes pacemakers out of those he sees around him and puts their heads higher than his own. He abdicates his own birthright.
MARGUERITE BEECHER
Beyond Success and Failure
Now all the truth is out,
Be secret and take defeat
From any brazen throat,
For how can you compete,
Being honor bred, with one
Who, were it proved he lies,
Were neither shamed in his own
Nor in his neighbors' eyes?
W.B. YEATS
"To a Friend whose Work has come to Nothing"
Meet my team
A contingency of nasty people
Wayne saw it
Let the competition begin
ROBERT POLLARD
"Meet My Team"
Competition is for dogs and horses.
GERI HALLIWELL
Success is whatever humiliation everyone has agreed to compete for.
JAMES RICHARDSON
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays
Real learning comes about when the competitive spirit has ceased. The competitive spirit is merely an additive process which is not learning at all. We want the child to learn and not merely add knowledge to himself like a machine. To help the child to learn basically and fundamentally he must cease to compete, with all its implications... Competitiveness is destructive not only in the classroom but right through life.
JIDDU KRISHNAMURTI
Krishnamurti on Education
Turn out the lights, the competition's over
The stubborn souls are the losers here tonight
And while the bridges burn
Another hard hard lesson's learned
TRAVIS TRITT
"Foolish Pride"
The reason why men who mind their own business succeed is that they have so little competition.
EVAN ESAR
20,000 Quips & Quotes
In business, the competition will bite you if you keep running; if you stand still, they will swallow you.
WILLIM S. KNUDSON
Business Today, 1994